Re: old machine wheezy vs apt
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 2:00 PM, Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 09:17:11AM +0300, Aleksandar Kostadinov wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> trying to make a print server from an old pentium 100 64M RAM. I had
>> to take that route because the USB<->parallel cables I've got don't
>> work. Anyways, first tried to install debian stable but it crashes on
>> boot. Something with the IDE controllers. btw I think there are some
>> nasty bugs with stable kernel because it crashes on a Intel core duo
>> laptop for other reasons. Anyways newer and older kernels work just
>> fine on these machines. So I went ahead and installed wheezy on the
>> machine (had to remove the vga=788 and quiet options, otherwise I
>> can't see the installer).
>>
>> Now the problem is that I can't install anything more on that machine
>> because apt-get update takes forever. It downloads package index from
>> the mirror but "reading package lists" step is so slow I'm not sure it
>> will ever complete. First 11% complete in a reasonable time but then
>> it seems it becomes slower as work progresses.
>
> Looking at the amount of RAM you have, I suspect that what's happening
> is that the first 11% of the work is able to fit into RAM, but then your
> system starts swapping. As far as I'm aware, Debian should run in 64M
> RAM, but it WILL need to swap a lot. I'm not entirely sure there's
> anything you can do about that except be patient.
Excuse me, that can't be serious. Not really usable to wait a week for
it to complete (if it ever does). All benefits using debian are lost
if apt unusable. I'm sure there must be at least a few ways to
workaround the situation. I've a 4G HDD in the machine besides the
boot drive of 1.2G so perhaps create a local proxy/mirror on it with a
small subset of the packages? Any ideas how to do so without the need
of another machine to serve as the proxy/mirror?
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